Should We Allow Scientists To Create Dangerous Super-Viruses?

Let's suppose a bunch of scientists proposed to take one of the most infectious human viruses—influenza, say—and turn it into a super-bug. Is this a good idea?

Or to put it another way: should scientists be artificially mutating viruses so that they have the potential to become a worldwide pandemic?

Right about now you might be asking: is anyone actually doing this, and if so, what on earth are they thinking?

And yet, several of the world's most prominent influenza researchers have been engaged in exactly this enterprise for several years now. They call their work "gain of function" experiments, because they manipulating viruses to give them new (and very dangerous) functions.

I wrote about this last year, after a group led by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin announced, in a letter to Nature, that they were going to turn the H7N9 influenza virus into a strain that had the potential to turn into a human pandemic. Sure enough, just a few months later, Fouchier published results showing they had done just that, although they reported that their newly engineered strain had only "limited" transmissibility between ferrets (the animal they used for all their experiments).

Chart showing mortality from the 1918 "Spanish flu" influenza pandemic in the US and Europe. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fouchier and Kawaoka had already done the same thing with the deadly H5N1 "bird flu" virus, causing a huge outcry among scientists and the public. As reported in Science magazine almost three years ago, Fouchier admitted that his artificially mutated H5N1 was "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make."

And yet he did it anyway—and then did it again, with H7N9.

Many other scientists are extremely concerned about these experiments, which some of us consider dangerous and irresponsible. This past July, a large group of scientists known as the Cambridge Working Group (of which I am a member) released a statement calling for a hiatus, saying:

"Experiments involving the creation of potential pandemic pathogens should be curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation, as well as comparison against safer experimental approaches."

Just two days ago, the U.S. government responded, announcing that it was going to take a serious look at whether creating these superbugs is a good idea. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is creating two committees to "assess the potential risks and benefits" of these experiments, particularly those involving the influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses.

Until the committees come up with recommendations, the government is halting any new funding for these experiments and asking for a voluntary "pause" on existing work.